The SPOSAD Architectural Style for Multi-tenant Software Applications

A multi-tenant software application is a special type of highly scalable, hosted software, in which the application and its infrastructure are shared among multiple tenants to save development and maintenance costs. The limited understanding of the underlying architectural concepts still prevents many software architects from designing such a system. Existing documentation on multi-tenant software architectures is either technology-specific or database-centric. A more technology-independent perspective is required to enable wide-spread adoption of multi-tenant architectures. We propose the SPOSAD architectural style, which describes the components, connectors, and data elements of a multi-tenant architecture as well as constraints imposed on these elements. This paper describes the benefits of a such an architecture and the trade-offs for the related design decisions. To evaluate our proposal, we illustrate how concepts of the style help to make current Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) environments, such as Force.com, Windows Azure, and Google App Engine scalable and customizable.